He speaks of her in passing, but with reverence, if not the Virgin Mother, then maybe Mary Magdalene to whom sainthood is deserved but denied.
Our conversation is not about her this time, but about his aspiration, a new project which he needs the opinion of women like her to review, not confident he can make it feel real as a man.
This comes out of talk about the past, before all this, beyond it even, from that other inspired project from which he is moving on, details of what was real and what he made up, and how it affected him and who he has become, the violence of growing up he had transformed into something different and yet the same.
How much of this is true, I can’t say, we writers live inside our own minds, filling in those details we need to create the picture we want, less fiction than a deeper truth facts don’t always support, creating in this case a past that should have been rather than one that was.
He seems desperate to shape his own reality, real or not, to give him a sense of importance he can’t get in our current reality, a man who had one point was set to step into the big shoes of his predecessor as boss only to have it snatched away from him in a last-minute betrayal.
He has been bitter ever since, withdrawn even, taking solace in this other creative hope, and perhaps she sensed this vulnerability in him, this need to feel as if he could contribute, and so let him become her mentor when in fact she is in some ways far beyond him, now, these roles reversed, she becoming his mentor as he seeks out her point of view.
They speak to each other even after she has moved on, he sending her his creative bits for her to evaluate, she once again the schoolmarm, and he her sole pupil, absent only the polished apple he might leave on her desk in thanks.
She consoled him when his previous work did not get the attention, he believed it deserved, and now helps him guide through a feminine landscape he could not navigate on his own, one of a number of guides no doubt, but an important one.
It is difficult to know if he really thinks he needs her input or merely needs the excuse to keep in touch, he, fearing that if he lets loose even this tenuous tie, she might drift out of his life entirely. He, no doubt, feeling the pangs of that day when he discovered she had resigned, a day he could not even speak her name for the pain.
From the tidbits he interjects in this conversation, I gather she has fed him some of the tall tales she told the Small Man, about her pursuing a career in television, although he tells me those plans are tentative.
“She left because she was going broke and got sick of our place,” he said.
This said a lot about their relationship, how she fed him her dreams, but kept him in the dark about what really transpired.
Perhaps he partly invented the tale for her, trying to come up with a motive that made sense to him in the absence of better information.
It is hard to tell what is real and unreal, and what he knows and does not know, only that he clings to that contact with the desperation of a child.
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